


Another Chime

by therowdybee



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29427495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therowdybee/pseuds/therowdybee
Summary: “Aren’t they already married?”Nicky looks up from the cake he’s icing and trying to stop Joe’s insistent fingers from ruining, to see Nile at the bottom of Andy’s step ladder, hands on her hips. Two years in and Nile’s questions haven’t stopped coming. She’s forever curious and young in a way that Nicky’s long forgotten about considering how long he’s been immortal.“Yeah,” Andy answers with a tone that suggests the end of the sentence includes an ‘and?’ “They get married every couple of decades or so.”
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 14
Kudos: 183
Collections: Centennial Celebration Collection





	Another Chime

“Aren’t they already married?” 

Nicky looks up from the cake he’s icing and trying to stop Joe’s insistent fingers from ruining, to see Nile at the bottom of Andy’s step ladder, hands on her hips. Two years in and Nile’s questions haven’t stopped coming. She’s forever curious and young in a way that Nicky’s long forgotten about considering how long he’s been immortal.

“Yeah,” Andy answers with a tone that suggests the end of the sentence includes an _‘and?’_ “They get married every couple of decades or so.”

“Why?”

Booker’s chuckling, his back against the wall and the fairy lights wrapped around his hand to pass up to Andy. “It means Nicky gets to be the poetic one for a change. Was it their last wedding Nicky spent five minutes describing Joe’s eyes to those of a lamb’s?”

Andy snorts, but it’s Joe who pipes up beside him, thankfully halting his mission of licking the icing from his fingers. “That was eight weddings ago, because we got married on a farm in Blaubeuren.”

“They had lambs,” he adds, offering Nile a soft smile. “They were very cute.”

“Okay… But that still doesn’t answer why?”

Joe opens his mouth and Nicky places the icing-covered spoon into it, snorting at the surprised look on his husband’s face. 

“It’s like a vow renewal,” Nicky said. With Joe momentarily occupied, he turns his full attention to Nile. “The world changes with every new century and we with it. So, we get married again, with new vows but old meanings. Our love changes with the world.”

“And because they’re sickening,” Andy jokes. Quynh pokes her in the stomach when she walks into the room from outside. Her dungarees have specks of red paint dotted from her ankles up and they match her paint speckled hands.

“It’s also our one-hundredth,” Nicky explains, pointedly ignoring Andy’s quip and Joe moving behind him to wrap his arms around his waist. He interlaced their fingers to stop his husband from going for more icing.

“Your… _one-hundredth_?” She looks shocked, which in hindsight, isn’t all that surprising. When she had asked if they remembered their own birthdays, the only person who answered had been Booker. The date had been forgotten, but he knew it was towards the end of March. “How do you even know?”

Shrugging himself free of Joe’s grip, Nicky picks the cake up to place it in the fridge as he answers. “We keep track of how many we’ve done. Sort of like an anniversary, but with the calendar changes, the date moved around a lot.” When he’s met with silence and can see a sceptical brow raise from the corner of his eye, he adds; “we write it down.”

The triumph in her face isn’t worth it. “So, immortals do need a diary?” It’d been a long-standing argument, with Nile trying to keep dates, and the rest of the family not caring to do so.

“You’re giving them too much credit,” Booker laughs, “Joe writes it down in his current sketchbook and then they work it out from there.”

Joe looks sheepish and with a glance to Nicky, then Booker, then Nile, he shrugs his shoulders.

“That just sounds complicated.”

“It is. Especially when they can’t remember which sketchbook was for which wedding and which safehouse.”

“But!” Joe cuts in, giving Booker a playful glare. “We have kept track nonetheless. Our system hasn’t failed us yet. It just takes a little longer to sort out.”

“No, that’s still complicated,” Nile says in disbelief, and the look she gives Nicky must mean that she doesn’t believe he allows this type of disorganisation. Normally, he wouldn’t, but from their first marriage, Joe had sketched their wedding night with the date and the tradition stuck. “I doubt the calendar will be changing any time soon, you can get a diary to help keep track.”

“You’d be surprised,” Andy grins, finishing the last hook on the fairy lights and stepping down from the ladder. “If it weren’t for our burner phones telling us the date, we wouldn’t even know what year it is.”

Booker gives a disdainful look that Nile laughs at. “Okay, well, how do you keep track? Do you have a complicated system like those two?”

“No.”

“… Then how do you keep track?”

“We don’t have weddings.” Quynh grins. 

“But didn’t you guys have that wedding when you got back together?” Seeing the open confusion on Nile’s face has Nicky taking pity on her.

“You can still have the reception without the wedding.” Andy answers, her hand sliding easily into Quynh’s. “We don’t need all of—” she gestures about the room “— _this_.”

“Andy prefers her love declarations in private,” Quynh offers, “unlike Yusuf.”

“I’ve grown accustomed to a certain way of living,” Joe shrugs, unashamed.

“As if Nicoló would ever let you live any other way.”

Nicky’s not ashamed of that either, but he can’t help to mutter “ _I will not apologise for enjoying the finer things this world has to offer_ ,” in Ligurian. Joe, Booker and Quynh all laugh while Andy just rolls her eyes. It’s a discussion they’ve had for too many centuries. He just shrugs. 

“I certainly hope not, my heart.” Joe laughs into his side, offering him a wink when Nicky catches his eye. “With every wedding comes a better luxury than the last.”

“You mean like, decorations?” Nile asks, pointing to the fairy lights — the only piece of decoration they have besides the banner outside drying.

“One of our weddings was in a brick cottage off the coast of Spain. The only decoration we had was a shell Andy had found and the flowers that Quynh stole from the farmer up the road. But decorations aren’t what I meant. Every wedding, we’ve been able to afford more comforts. Safety, togetherness, love, family. For this one, it’s knowing we’re all together as a family, we have more people to share our love with.”

“I guess you’ve never had more than the four of you for your weddings, right?”

“Yes. Nicky and I only got married once between losing Quynh and finding Booker.” Joe’s change of tone is barely noticeable, but Nicky still moves to him like water rolling to the shore. That wedding hadn’t been so much about love but more about reassuring each other that they had one another. They had taken to holding each other and recited every vow shared between them. 

“I can see how it's a big one,” Nile smiles, bright and comforting like she knows even without all the details laid before her. “What were your other weddings like?”

“Their first wedding was in moonlight on a beach,” Quynh grins, her eyes sparkling with mischievousness. “They were drunk and Joe proclaimed that he wanted to marry Nicky. He did by almost setting himself on fire.”

“Oh, he definitely set himself on fire.” Andy laughs, “he stood right in the centre of it and set his leg on fire while talking about the warmth Nicky provided him.”

“You never told me this story,” Booker chastises, but it’s obvious it’s more to tease Joe.

“One — I didn’t set myself on fire, someone decided to build a fire where I was standing — and secondly; I would do it again to have my love pick me up.”

“You refused to move and dunking you in the water was my only option,” Nicky comments dryly, making the room chuckle.

“Was that your stupidest wedding?” Nile asks curiously.

“Yes,” Nicky and Joe say at the same time as Andy and Quynh reply with a strong “No.” It’s a problem when all but three weddings involved Andy. No amount of baklava will silent her either.

Nile’s face contorts into excitement.

“Iran, seventy-two,” Andy grins like a shark. Nicky can already feel the embarrassment settle over him. From the corner of his eye he can see Nile’s eyes bulge.

“Right, right,” Booker chuckles. “The blizzard.”

Joe groans beside him.

“No, you did not freeze to death!” Nile turns her full attention to them now. “Please tell me you didn’t die in the middle of your marriage!”

“In our defence, the blizzard wasn’t anticipated.” Joe glances at him, a small smirk on his lips, clearly finding humour in the situation. Nicky can’t help but return it. “It was only snowing when we started until the wind picked up.”

“The door to our house was frozen, I did tell you we could wait.”

“I could never wait with your—”

“Stop—”

“—Gross—” Nile and Quynh cut in. They’re now standing close together, eyes wide with the eagerness that comes with learning something new.

“—Either way,” Nicky continues, “the short of the story was that the blizzard came through and buried us beneath snow.”

“After it blew Nicky away from the house,” Andy chimes in unhelpfully.

“How do you determine what’s a wedding and what’s just Joe waxing at you poetically?” Nile thankfully changes topic. Nicky really does love her.

“I can tell,” he offers, smirking when she just looks confused. “We talk about it, like any normal person.”

“And they’ve never gotten married in snow before because Joe doesn’t like the cold,” Booker adds. Joe’s reaction is another shrug.

“Wait,” Nile straightens, glancing at everyone’s face before they narrow back on Nicky and Joe. “Same-sex marriage is legal now, so have you guys ever gotten married legally? Or are they all just ceremonies?”

In sync as they always are, Nicky turns his head at the same time as Joe and they share a look of fondness. He can see the same thought in Joe’s eyes before he’s turning his head to answer. “Two of them are.”

“Only two?”

“Eighteenth century, I think,” Joe picks his hand up, thumb running across his fingers as he speaks, but all his attention is on Nicky and that makes a shiver run up his spine. “Nicky makes a beautiful bride, and white has always been his colour.”

Nicky’s blush comes on embarrassingly fast despite hearing it all before.

“Nicky dressed as a woman?” There’s no judgement in Nile’s voice, but she still appears surprised.

Joe hums, looking like the fool in love that he is. Nicky just shakes his head, sighing, and looks back to Nile. “I enjoy it every now and then. Certain countries wouldn’t blindly overlook two men together, so I would go out looking like a woman and no one would look twice.”

“Ah, that is where you are wrong, Nicoló. Many looked twice.” As if to prove a point, a hand pinches his rear, but before he can do anything about it, the room erupts in loud gagging. A shame, Nicky thinks.

“What about the other time? You said you have two legal marriages, what’s the second.”

“Malta.” Andy and Booker answer Nile. She’s been around long enough to know Malta is a special haven they frequent when the family need a holiday away from each other. Or as Andy commented once ‘ _their sex-cation’_.

“How many times have you gotten married in Malta?”

“That answer is probably in a sketchbook somewhere,” Joe purses his lips, thinking. “Malta has always been leading in same-sex relationships since the twelfth century.”

“But it became common practice in the fourteenth century, especially when it came to our ethnicity.” Nicky adds.

“So at least once every century since then.” Joe continues, “that was our last wedding, evidently. Although most of the world legalised it before then, when they legalised it in twenty-seventeen, we took our chance.”

Nile’s brows pull in a frown, “if you only got married five years ago, why are you getting married now?”

“It’s a special one. Besides it being our one-hundredth, this one means a lot more than the rest.”

“What makes this one so special?” With Nile’s question, Nicky can see everyone’s facial expression change.

Andy and Quynh exchange a look that makes warmth spread through him, overjoyed that his sisters are together again after so long. Booker’s smile meets his eyes like they have been the past year and, if Nicky wasn’t so happy, so at home, he’d dwell in his guilt that he should’ve noticed it sooner. Behind him, Joe’s breath tickles his ear before there’s a kiss dropped on his shoulder as if he had the thought out loud.

Nile’s own expression has changed. It’s the look she gets sometimes late at night when she’s introducing them all to a new movie or series. When they’re all together, a whole family, and there’s so much love and contentedness on her face that makes Nicky feel incredibly proud of her.

“It’s special because our whole family is together again.” Joe says, warm and happy. Nicky closes his eyes, leaning into his husband’s arms before whispering.

“At last.”

**Author's Note:**

> I also drew a picture to accompany it that you can find on my tumblr @ therowdybee
> 
> Thank you to everyone who helped me over in the discord.


End file.
